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Friday, 2 December 2011

Edits

Just finished the first edits on Black Carnival, and after a few clarifications among all parts involved on how to proceed, it seems to me that all went nice and smooth, not to mention tolerably painless. But then having broken both bones in my right arm without shedding a single tear, I may just have higher pain tolerance than generally supposed.

I realized while editing BC that the big edits, those that affect the structure of the novel, are a lot easier to accept than small things like the removal of a "fancy" speech tag. Maybe it's because the plot is done with the brain but the voice of the charachters in certain scenes is something that very much belongs into the guts and instinct of my writing self. Anyway. Evernight allowed me to save some of my fancy tag, for which I will be forever grateful. When Stacey's ok-mail came I went running through my horse's pasture waving my arms and singing "whispered, whispered, whispered!". The neighbours (and my horse) probably thought that I was insane. My husband, who knows me well, and bears all my rants with stoical fortitude, watched me for a while and then just asked: "Tags?"

Most of chapter 3 went out of the window, unregretted. It will surely reincarnate as a short story. The ending is more clearly happy, although some tears still flow. The heroine whines much less (even when gagged). The hero behaves and makes the necessary promise. Good boy. What days we live in, if it takes an editor to make heros behave!

Curiously enough, while trying to explain his aloof behaviour, a more obvious bond emerged between this book and its sequel, althought the story still stands alone.

In the meantime stories bubble up in my brain, some darker, some less. There are the Prequels to Black Carnival, a collection of short stories about the main charachters in the book. And of course White Sands, the sequel, which grows a bit, stops, grows a bit more, and stops again (mostly for lack of a convincing villain). There is the growing shadow of a Naughty Fairy Tale. Poems come and go, scattering stardust over all.
I am a slow writer and a hopeless pantser, which means that all these stories are stewing my brain to mush. But at least I entertain myself cheaply.

I am also doing a very minimal amount of reading. The bad thing about writing is that it makes it nearly impossible to read (at least for me). I am slowly enjoying Adonis Devereaux's Worth his Freedom, and the quite different Bound to be Free, mentioned in my last post. And occasionally I just need to "go home", and then sort out something by O'Brian, or Tolkien.